Eastern Europe's Mass Refusal to Take in Immigrants

This is a transcript of a segment from John Derbyshire's highly acclaimed and hugely popular podcast - Radio Derb - , a weekly conservative run-down of political events, with a focus on the immigration crisis in the US and Europe. It can be easily listened to on computer or via smartphone app.

If you're not listening, you are missing out

Derbyshire is a prominent conservative American political columnist, formerly of the National Review, now with Vdare.com.

Russia Insider listens every week, and recommends it highly, along with the excellent Vdare.com website which has the same focus.

In this segment, Derbyshire comments on Eastern European attitudes to taking in immigrants (uniformly hostile), and contrasts it to the opposite view in the Cult-Marx West.

Derbyshire working the hustings

This has big implications for Russia's role in Eastern Europe, because these conservative majorities in the East are natural allies of Russia, which shares their attitudes towards immigration - as evidenced in the pro-Russian stance of the Hungarian parties.

The deeper the West digs itself into its suicidal immigration dead-end, the more it will alienate the East - pushing Russia and Eastern Europe together.

Steve Bannon’s interview with CBS’ Charlie Rose delighted VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow because Bannon confirmed Brimelow’s argument that Trump, contrary to general perception, did try to compromise with the GOP Establishment—Bannon even called it the “the Original Sin of the Administration”.

And it must delight all VDARE.com readers because of Bannon’s forthright dismissal of immigration enthusiasm (as well as the idea of a DACA Amnesty):

CHARLIE ROSE: America was, in the eyes of so many people, and it’s what people respect America for, it is people have been able to come here, find a place, contribute to the economy. That’s what immigration has been in America. And you seem to want to turn it around and stop it.

STEVE BANNON: You couldn’t be more dead wrong. America was built on her citizens.

The same fault line, between globalists and nationalists, is also evident over in Europe. Last week saw a widening of the gulf between the spineless, suicidal Western Europeans and those Eastern-bloc nations determined to maintain their demographic stability in the face of mass invasions from Africa and the Middle East.

Several Eastern countries have just refused to take their quotas. Poland, for example, was given a quota of six thousand and some. Total admitted so far: zero. Hungary’s quota was thirteen hundred. Total admitted so far: zero. Slovakia’s quota was a mere nine hundred. Total admitted: zero.

Czechia has been a tad less delinquent. Their quota was 27 hundred: they’ve admitted twelve.

Not twelve hundred; just twelve.

Hungary and Slovakia, with support from Poland, which has had a change to a more nationalist government since that summit, brought a complaint to the Court of Justice arguing that the quota agreement was not properly decided. That’s the complaint the Court rejected this week.

Responding to this week’s ruling, the East Europeans are defiant, the Hungarians most of all. The court decision was, said that country’s foreign minister, “outrageous and irresponsible” and “endangers the future and security of Europe as a whole.” “Politics raped European law,” he thundered to reporters in Budapest. [Hungary and Slovakia defiant after EU court rebuke, by Eszter Zalan, EUObserver, September 5, 2017]

Still, this is a key fault line in the worldwide ideological struggle between nationalism and globalism. Their governments’ defiance of the EU is popular with East Europeans, even though these countries are big beneficiaries of EU subsidies. Poland is the biggest beneficiary of regional aid in the EU; yet an opinion poll conducted in June this year found that 51 percent of Poles support leaving the EU if that’s the only way to stop an influx of Muslims. [Poles Value Denying Muslim Refugees Over Being in EU, Poll Shows, By Marek Strzelecki, Bloomberg, July 5, 2017]

Even more striking, younger Poles — in the 18-24 age group — are more anti-EU than Poles in general. The word “Polexit” has already been coined. [Is there any prospect of ‘Polexit’?, by Aleks Szczerbiak, Polish Politics Blog, September 7, 2017]

Similarly in Hungary, the second biggest and most influential country in the group. Hungary has elections coming up next year, and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, which is strongly nationalist, was polling at 53 percent in July. Polling second at 21 percent was Jobbik—which is even morenationalist.

There is just not much of a market for transnationalist globalism in East Europe—even though these countries are net beneficiaries of EU aid programs.

I know, I know: these are small, distant countries whose concerns seem remote from our own. Or as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain described what was then Czechoslovakia in 1938: “a faraway land of which we know little.”